New Orleans – In a breathless finale that has been called one of this generation’s greatest adventures in civil engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers has all but completed repairs to this city’s ruined levee system.

With just days to go before the beginning of the hurricane season, the Corps’ $800 million effort has even improved the system in many ways, engineering experts say, with tougher concrete flood walls, brawny new canal gates and more than 150 miles of new or repaired levees.

Even though all sides agree that the Corps has largely achieved its goal, independent engineers say it is the goal that is the real problem. New Orleans is still very much at risk, they say, because the level of protection the Corps has reached is still not as strong as the city needs.

Many experts view the coming hurricane season with trepidation and hope that the system is not put to a test like Katrina before further improvements can be made.

“Some of these things were poorly designed and were almost pre-ordained to fail,” said Wayne Clough, head of a National Research Council team that formed at the request of the Department of Defense to assess the Corps’ probe of the disaster.

Portions that didn’t fail, he said, could still have been weakened by last year’s storms.

“Just because they’ve been restored to their condition pre-Katrina doesn’t mean they are perfectly safe,” he said.

Raymond Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of the Corps’ most consistent critics, said he does not doubt that the system is, to use the mantra of the Corps, “better and stronger” in many ways. But, he asked, “better enough?”

Seed and other experts who have studied the crazy quilt of levees, flood walls, pumps and gates that has been in the process of being built for more than 40 years conclude now that they were never adequate to protect hundreds of thousands of people in an urban setting and that the levees themselves are known to be fundamentally flawed.

Corps officials say repairing the damage of the last storm while preparing for new ones is a challenge they are up to.